The Artist / Archivalist

David Aldous is an archival tree printer. He travels on foot through remote forests in Australia, New Zealand and Japan, searching for fallen trees and pressing their growth rings onto Japanese Hosho paper creating limited edition works from each tree.

You’ve probably stopped beside a fallen tree without quite knowing why. That pause — that instinct that something here deserves more than a glance — is where this started.

For me it was Mt Feathertop, 2014. A stack of mountain ash, brought down by weather. Sitting there catching my breath, I looked at all those rings and couldn’t stop looking. Similar but different, every one of them. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I needed to find out what that meant.

I’m a carpenter by trade. I kept timber others would discard from demolition sites — it never felt right to throw away something that took decades to become what it was. That same instinct runs through every pressing. These trees have already lived their full life. The work is simply bearing witness to that.

Fire is part of the process — a controlled burn that opens the grain and brings the rings to the surface. I work entirely by hand. I print fifteen or twenty editions in the field to find the ten worth keeping. It takes days, sometimes more.

For every tree I work with, one hundred native trees are planted in return. A portion of every sale goes to the Indigenous custodians of the land. Not as an afterthought. As the point.